All the world’s a stage.

I read those words long ago, but didn’t appreciate the stage itself until recently. As a child, I struggled to wade through school books rife with flowing descriptions. Who cares what kinds of trees are outside the house, if there is a swing set near someone’s first kiss or if a fog sits heavy on a town?

When I was my son’s age, I found those details as relevant as the cars that drove by me on my walk to junior high school. Action and dialogue meant so much more. I wanted to hear what people said or know what they were thinking.

I now appreciate the stage more than ever. In fact, I’d like to go back to Ward Melville High School and thank the stage crew for building sets that turned the stage into the Upper West Side in the 1950s or a yellow brick road.

My appreciation for a setting, however, extends beyond the actual stage. It’s in the seats of an auditorium, where a shared armrest becomes the location for the first tentative effort to hold hands.

The setting continues through the wooden doors that, like eyes focusing from a distance, have opened simultaneously, allowing an appreciative audience its first glimpse of the land that awaits. It’s a part of the marble hallway, where the chatter of birds on nearby trees supplants the chitchat of children, who seem to race out through a revolving glass door that allows the nearby rays of the sun to pour inside.

We can shift our attention to blades of grass on the playground, where an undersized third-grade transfer student catches a fly ball for the first time and suddenly feels as if everything will be OK in his new town. That same blade of grass can provide cover for an earthworm as it looks to go back underground after a heavy rainstorm, lest the birds circling overhead stop to bring the worm back to a nest of hungry birds waiting at the top of an awning on a boarded-up house the children believe is haunted.

A setting can become altered the way a police siren appears to change from the Doppler effect. Even though the alarm wails at the same frequency, its pitch seems different as the sound approaches. The basketball net that appeared to be impossibly high when we were in first grade is remarkably close to our hands as we age, making us feel as if we’ve become Gulliver in our own lives.

Nostalgia can imbue a setting with emotion. I recently drove down my old block. I saw a version of me that was younger than my children are now. I could see myself staring out the side window of my room across a row of evergreens, letting my eyes become blurry to soften the colors of the red, green, purple, yellow and white Christmas lights down the block. If we were lucky some evenings, the snow would cause the lights to flicker.

Down below those tall evergreens and just outside my front window were several bushes. During the fall, with a full moon and a violent wind, the needles on those bushes transformed into a man with a mohawk hairstyle swaying back and forth.

One morning, those bushes disappeared. I tentatively pulled back the shade, where a dump truck of snow buried my menacing friend. The bushes bent over double, as if the man with the mohawk had taken a hard punch to the gut.

As I squinted at the scene, I knew that I had aged but the man with the mohawk hadn’t.

Yes, each setting is alive with possibilities.

You’ve got a friend in me.

You ain’t never had a friend like me.

You want a friend in this town? Get a dog.

You’re not my friend anymore.

And, perhaps, one of history’s deepest friend cuts, “Et tu, Brute?” Then again, I’m not sure how much Julius Caesar considered Brutus his friend on that fateful day.

We’ve all heard about or had unusual, spectacular and backstabbing friends. These people, who aren’t our relatives but with whom we voluntarily spend time, are in a category of people that distinguishes them from strangers who push past us on the freeway, along the sidewalk or the line at the cafeteria.

And while we’re certainly aware of the dangers of unrequited love from literature and history, are there unrequited friendships?

If you believe a recent study out of Tel Aviv University in Israel, the answer is a resounding “yes,” and it happens more often than we might hope. This research found that only half of those other people called their friends returned the favor. That means if you like John and Joe, chances are John might like you, but Joe could be somewhere between indifferent to you or annoyed at the way you tap his arm each time you say something too insignificant to break physical boundaries to share.

So, that left me in a quandary. How do I know who I want to be my friends and who wants me to be his or her friend?

Maybe, I thought, as my wife and I went out to dinner for the first time with another couple, we would become friends with two people at once. Could this, like that famous line in “Casablanca,” be “the beginning of a beautiful friendship?”

I had no such dramatic hopes, focusing instead on the little stuff: What should I wear, what would we discuss, did we have anything in common — and should I try to order quietly with the waiter while my wife distracted the couple so they didn’t know I was lactose intolerant?

A few moments after we sat down, I realized I didn’t have to speed read through the menu looking for items that my children would tolerate.

The woman from the other couple did the equivalent of shooting layups, as the rest of us listened. She shared stories about the academic and extracurricular interests of her children. That, I thought as I nodded politely at everything she said, was friendly enough.

Gradually we worked into a comfortable rhythm, even venturing into the potentially treacherous area of national politics. When I brought it up, I knew I ran the risk of talking with someone with incredibly strong opinions that conflicted with my own. Within seconds, however, it was clear that all four of us held similar political views.

When the evening ended, the men shook hands and gave social air kisses to the wives. The evening went well; I don’t think I embarrassed myself, my children or my wife. Now, are these people our friends? Not yet, I suppose, but the four of us are, perhaps, friendlier.

As we drove to pick up our son, who was at a late-night party with around 100 of his closest friends that would undoubtedly make him irrational and irascible the next day, I recalled the warnings about the dangers of becoming friends with our kids. They don’t need friends. Rather, what they need are authority figures who can tell them what they don’t want to hear, or so the advice goes.

But, wait, like a good movie where the solution is right in front of my face, I recalled a friendly tip from long ago: It’s important to be friends with the person you are dating. That, I realized, was excellent advice. It’s much easier to share a life with the one out of two people who reciprocates a friendship.

I can’t see anything up close with my glasses on and I can’t see anything at a distance with my glasses off. I know, I know, welcome to getting old. Well, I’d like to give that aging process a big fat Bronx cheer.

But, wait, technology can come to the rescue. No, I’m not talking about laser surgery and I’m not looking for a special blended form of bifocal, trifocal or whatever. No, you see, technology makes it possible for me to use my state-of-the-art smartphone without needing to see it.

“Siri, send a text message to my wife,” I can say.

To which the automatic voice activation feature will reply, “What is your wife’s name?” And then, when I don’t reply in time, the voice will say, “I’m not sure what you said there.”

But assuming Siri and I can get on the same page about the desired recipient of my intended message, I can start talking into the phone and she will take dictation. No need for an administrative assistant like Mrs. Wiggins, courtesy of Carol Burnett, to take a memo.

Except that, like Mrs. Wiggins, there are some potential comedic kinks in the system. For one thing, whenever I start a text or email with the word Hi, Siri only seems to hear the letter “I.” My texts start out with “I Dr. Smith.” It’s a poor start to have a missing letter at the beginning of a text or email that I can’t check because I can’t see well with my glasses on and I can’t take my glasses off in that moment.

While Siri gets most of the words right, sometimes she struggles with grammar and words that are pronounced alike — such as to, too and two. Or what I mumble. I admit that I don’t always speak clearly. In fact, when I say, “This is Dan,” people sometimes hear, “This is Stan,” because I don’t pause long enough before saying my name.

I was discussing this problem with a friend of mine, who spends a considerable number of hours in the car each week, traveling from one job to another. He said he dictates emails and text messages on his phone constantly to make use of his travel time.

“Hey, be careful when you’re dictating, particularly when you’re driving,” he cautioned.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, you know that thing picks up everything you say, right?”

“Yeah?” I asked, tilting my head to the side and waiting for a punch line.

“The other day I was driving and I sent an email that went something like this:

“Dear Mr. Jones, I got your response to my invoice and … oh, so you thought cutting me off in my lane was a good idea? And you didn’t even use your blinker. Where’d you get your license? … I was wondering if we might discuss the additional cost of gas which, as you know, is … that’s how I would drive if I had a death wish, too … climbing. Anyway, I’m happy to discuss by phone or at a … thanks for sharing your music with us. That’s what we all want to hear when we’re at a traffic light, your music. Isn’t that how we got some dictators to surrender, by playing that kind of music outside their presidential estates? … meeting. OK, so give me a call when you have a chance.”

While he said that was a slight exaggeration, he realized something was amiss when someone wrote back, “OK, next time I’ll use my blinker.”

Words mean everything. Words mean nothing.

What’s going on in the world of words? Well, for one, we’ve become hypersensitized to words. Or, wait, maybe we’re desensitized.

We fling words across the aisle at our enemies, becoming both a victim and a perpetrator. We are more sensitive than the other guy until he seems absurd, and then we claim that his hypersensitivity is triggering our insensitivity.

And therein lies the tricks of the trade. Shakespeare would have a field day with a world so preoccupied with gender. The Bard focused on gender identity and gender issues through many of his writings and musings.

Are we the gender we choose, or do others have too much to lose, if we allow people to use the restroom of their gender identity?

Now that it looks like it’ll be Trump versus Clinton, the epic battle will no doubt become a war of words, wills and wallets. Who has the most money, where did it come from — and how will these people who have millions and billions help those with big dreams but small bank accounts?

Bernie Sanders isn’t going gently into that good night, nor should he. He’s forced Clinton to focus on the unequal distribution of wealth and he seems to be having a jolly time through a primary season that has brought pain and suffering to so many Republicans.

Whither Jeb Bush? The poor establishment candidate had the money but not the votes, while Trump directed verbal daggers at everyone else in the field. Whether Cruz was a lyin’ guy or not, Trump stuck that label on him the way novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne attached the scarlet “A” (for adulteress) to Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter.”

Now that he’s no longer in the race, will Cruz decide to play the lyre, or will he retire from the national scene?

You have to imagine Trump is preparing memorable one-liners for the woman who wants a shot at the White House. When you don’t have anything else to say this year, make sure you point an angry finger in the direction of your adversary for whom you have abundant animosity.

Will Hillary deflect the disparaging dialogue the Donald directs, or will she flutter and stutter like so many of Trump’s other adversaries who have become political roadkill? Will he focus on her face as he did with Carly Fiorina?

Leaving the political realm, how about those Yankees? I know the better bet is the Mets. The team from Queens is proving that last year was no aberration, and it has the pitching and the hitting to play deep into October. But I’m a Yankee fan through and through which means that, these days, I’m feeling blue. I suspect the cast of “Gilligan’s Island” might even feel sympathy for a team that’s discovered a myriad of methods to strand runners every game, with nary a chance to cross the plate and return home.

The Bronx Bombers are playing like Bronx Bummers. This team, with its expensive, aging veterans and its floundering youngsters, may finish below .500. Even in a world where one out of three isn’t bad for a hitter, one out of two wins is horrific for any team.

And then there are the movies, those sweet escapes from the political jungle and the athletic battlefield. But wait, the top-grossing movies of last weekend were “The Jungle Book” and the Civil War movie with Captain America, which means that even in our movie dreams we are escaping to familiar themes. Maybe we enjoy our imaginary characters going to battle, allowing us to turn our words into swords.

Some conversations need a decoder.

“I hate you,” in middle school often means, “Why don’t you pay more attention to me? I think you’re pretty awesome and I don’t know how to tell you that directly.”

Or, how about:

“What you did isn’t so great. I could have done that.”

Translation: “Damn, I wish I had thought of that. Where’d you get that idea?”

“Johnny is so much worse at this than I am.”

Translation: “Johnny may or may not be much worse than I am, but I can’t possibly be the worst one at wrapping holiday presents. Please, tell me that I’m not at the bottom of the barrel in this activity.”

Parents have their own way of communicating with each other and/or speaking about their children. Most of the things we say, either to our spouses, to their teachers or to other parents, are direct and straightforward. I’ve had some recent conversations in sporting matters where the subtext is so obvious that I thought I’d share my own decoder.

Me: “So, how do you think the team looks this year?”

Superdad: “Well, my son has spent much of the offseason preparing for this.”

Translation: “I poured thousands of dollars into training. He better do well and you all better notice it quickly, if you want to protect my son and the trainers from my wrath.”

Then there was a recent discussion about various volleyball skill sets among our daughters. I was speaking with the mother of a girl who is so much taller than my daughter that she’d have to bend down to eat peanuts off the top of my daughter’s head. This other girl plays the frontline almost exclusively.

Me: “So your daughter Clara looked great in the front today.”

Superdad: “Yeah, but she’s the best one on the team in the back line. She just never gets there, but she’s scary good back there, too.”

Translation: “I probably wasn’t that good at sports when I was younger and I want my daughter to define awesome on this team. In fact, this team would probably be better if we either cloned my daughter and had her play every position or if we took a few of your daughters off the floor for some of the game, until my daughter was able to give us a big enough lead.”

Bragging about our kids is inevitable, and probably helpful as a way to assure ourselves that there is a payoff for all the work of getting them to and from practices, rehearsals and other activities.

There are those parents who feign disappointment in their children.

Faker: “Oh, man, did you see that she only got two outs when she could have had a triple play? Now, that would have been something special.”

Translation: “She made the most incredible catch anyone has made this year and she would have had a triple play if your daughter hadn’t been studying the butterfly over in the bushes. Next time, maybe the team will be ready for that kind of play and your child can play a supporting role in my child’s greatness.”

And then there are the parents who work to limit any praise for their children, warding off the evil eye.

Me: “Wow, your son made a sensational running catch in the end zone. Congratulations.”

Superstitious parent: “Yeah, I guess it was OK, but the throw from the quarterback and the blocking by the other boys was even more impressive.”

Translation: “He’s OK, but don’t call too much attention to him.”

And then there are the put-it-in-perspective parents:

Me: “That was a tough game, no?”

PP: “I suppose, but they get to go home to a comfortable house with supportive parents.”

Translation: “Win or lose, life is good.”

While representatives from many nations signed the landmark Paris Agreement about greenhouse gas emissions, students, professors and guest lecturers descended on Stony Brook last week to celebrate and discuss ways of protecting the environment as a part of Earthstock.

The 15th annual event, which featured activities and a celebration of student research, included a lecture from Charles Wurster, founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, who offered ways to persuade the public to support saving the environment.

Wurster described the beginning of the EDF, which started modestly in Stony Brook with a meeting of nine environmental scientists and one lawyer to prevent the loss of birds amid the use of the insecticide DDT.

Wurster and his colleagues were “sitting around a coffee table figuring out how to take on” a wide range of groups, including the federal government, to get them to stop spraying a pesticide that was weakening the shells of raptor eggs, said Malcolm Bowman, distinguished service professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and academic co-chair of Earthstock. Bowman said one of the reasons he joined Stony Brook in 1971 was because he “could see a revolution taking place.”

The university’s continued commitment to the environment was on display all week.

The annual celebration included a rubber duck race down a “stony brook,” outdoor yoga at the Staller Center, and a performance by a local band called Peatmoss and the Fertilizers.

Jeffrey Barnett, the interim associate dean of students and the administrative co-chair for Earthstock, said the program helps Stony Brook “connect with the local community by taking actions and educating the next generation. The festival is a way to engage people.”

John Warner, co-founder of Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, provided the keynote speech on Friday.

Warner suggested that “if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have all these problems” with toxic chemicals, Bowman said. As an example, Bowman said, Warner described a beetle that sheds its skin. The chemical in that skin has remarkable dying properties and could be used in hair dye.

Warner is involved in supporting green asphalt and green chemistry, said Karina Yager, a visiting assistant professor. “Hearing his passion helps reinforce how important it is to stay engaged with this sustainability framework,” Yager said.

Earth science and environmental science teacher Rob Gelling, from Kings Park High School, brought 22 students to the festivities on Friday.

His students “enjoyed the feedback from the general public that came to our table and learned about the ability to recycle,” Geller said. His students highlighted a way to repurpose Keurig K-cups into containers in which they planted seeds. Half of the germination medium came from dried and sifted coffee grinds.

Back at the United Nations on Earth Day, the United States joined officials from other countries to sign the Paris agreement.

“There is momentum” in fighting climate change, said Yager. “Major changes have to be implemented within the next few decades to reach that goal realistically. Some are skeptical, but at least we’re on the right pathway.”

Yager said the week-long activities at Earthstock can contribute to action and awareness in the Stony Brook and Long Island communities.

“I remember when Earth Day was just a day,” Yager said. Now Earthstock is a week, which includes opportunities to “meet people who share the same vision and find out new ways to get involved.”

Some ideas or lessons stick with us through the decades. Religions offer plenty: We should treat others the way we want to be treated and we should respect our elders, to name two.

From my grammar school world, the Venn diagram is one concept that offers such a wonderful visual image that I think about it or rely on it with some regularity.

Do you remember the Venn diagram? It has two adjoining circles with a varying amount of overlap in the middle, and the theory can be applied to almost any circumstance.

Let’s start with sports, where passions are high, but the consequences of any single event or season are, relatively speaking, much lower.

Red Sox and Yankee fans would seem to have almost nothing in common, with two circles drawn as far away on a page as humanly possible. But each year there is at least one game where a Red Sox fan might root for a Yankee and a Yankee might root for a member of the Red Sox. Yes, think about it. The all-star game determines the home field advantage for the World Series. If the result of the all-star game was on the line and a member of the Red Sox could win the game with a home run, wouldn’t a Yankee fan begrudgingly cheer for that player in the hope that if our team made it to a seventh game of the World Series, the game would be at Yankee Stadium? There, we might get to see our team win a title instead of in a National League park.

From the passion of sports to the passions in our lives, a Venn diagram can also be useful in affairs of the heart. Let’s say you’re dating and you’re exploring similarities in your partner. Do you like the same food, books and movies? Do you have the same view on the importance of family, the role you might play in a community or the value of vacation time?

While all of these questions might lead to a better understanding of where you have common ground, marriage counselors or even dating services might suggest that circles with a perfect overlap might not create a perfect couple. After all, some differences or nonoverlapping spaces might make for a refreshing extension of our own circles. Maybe, as part of these relationships, we look for ways to expand the circles that define what we know and have experienced.

Even relationships that have ended can help shape ways to find common ground with someone else.

Then there’s politics. We will need to pick a president in November. Do any of the candidates overlap with your circle? Maybe, instead of looking at the breadth of their campaigns, you can consider the depth or importance of any one issue, extending that middle ground into a three-dimensional space. Maybe your vote will reflect whatever common ground you can find on a single issue, while rolling your eyes at the differences on so many other topics.

Ultimately, it seems that the most effective politician might not be someone who wants to fight for us, as Hillary Clinton suggests in her campaign mantra. And it might not be someone who wants to make America great again, as Donald Trump urges. Instead, it might be someone who can find the greatest common ground with other politicians and with other Americans.

We know that the best policies for Iowa likely won’t be the best for New York, but there must be ways to get New Yorkers and Iowans to find a national leader who can represent all of us — and not just those who are part of our inner circle.

My nephew will never be on a Wheaties box. He won’t be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, either, and he won’t be in a team picture that glows with the warmth of broad, confident smiles at the end of a championship season.

Nonetheless, he works just as hard and puts in just as much time, dedicating himself to college sports at his Division I school as do many of the athletes whose natural talents and achievements thousands of students, alumni and fans applaud at arenas, fields and stadiums around the country.

My nephew is an emergency medical technician and is studying the field of kinesiology, which is the science of human movement. Someday he will either be a doctor, a trainer or some combination thereof where his knowledge of the way the body works will enable him to help athletes and nonathletes alike overcome injuries, stresses and strains or their own physical challenges.

He is a part of the team behind the team. He doesn’t lead chants and he doesn’t scream for the adoring fans to get out of their seats. He helps get athletes back on their feet again back in the stadium, and back to doing what they love when the inevitable battle of wills brings two people into the same space at the same time.

Every morning he gets up some time around sunrise, as he slowly slinks out of his dorm room to the training center. There, he waits patiently, hoping his services aren’t necessary but ready, willing and able to help any of the injured athletes who need immediate medical attention.

He is like so many of the other medical and emergency response crews who close their eyes not knowing whether they’ll be able to rest for two minutes, two hours or 10 hours when they go to sleep.

He works with amateur athletes who might one day make an Olympic team, a professional team, set a school record in an athletic event or simply bring glory to his college for one magnificent day. He dedicates himself, day after day, to his fellow students.

We recently visited him at his school, where he had a rare day off because the team he’s helping didn’t need him that day. We twisted his arm to watch a softball game on an unusually cold afternoon.

The team played a doubleheader. My nephew saw his counterpart on the field during the first game of the doubleheader. The next day, he said he found out that his friend arrived two hours before the first game and didn’t leave until at least an hour after the second game ended, which means he spent about nine hours of a weekend day focused on supporting these athletes.

This is great training, building his professional endurance, giving him opportunities to see sports injuries — and helping him figure out where on the medical sports spectrum he’d like to dedicate himself. Still, I couldn’t help remembering some of the slow, lazy mornings in college, the hours tossing a baseball back and forth on a lawn, and the carefree joy of watching my school’s hockey team win a big game. My nephew, by choice, spends hours he could be studying or hanging out with buddies playing an important supportive role well behind the bench.

Athletes defy gravity, each other and their own limitations to become the kinds of heroes we celebrate each day. At the same time, when those limitations catch up with them, they turn to people like my nephew and a deep bench of medical talent to bring them back to the games they love. My nephew may not be on the field but he, like so many others at these big schools with winning athletic programs, plays an important role off of it.

Forgive me for smiling. In my head, I see a face. It could be the face of a mother, father, sister, brother, neighbor or even the face in the mirror.

I think of all the range of expressions and emotions from that face. It can be ecstatic that a son or daughter was born, it can be pushing hard to bring that baby into the world, it can be straining with all its might to cross a finish line — or it can be waiting anxiously at an elegant eatery for an eHarmony date to appear while trying to appear casually indifferent.

With my quality time often involving my wife and children, I picture the faces of the parents who attend a concert or sporting event, while also envisioning the faces of the kids battling against each other, the clock, their instruments or some confounding assignment.

The part about the faces that’s bringing a smile to my own is envisioning a scrambler button, mismatching the words and expressions to the situation. Instead of a face and tone that showed rapturous glee after getting a ticket to a live performance at Madison Square Garden, I’ve imagined that same elation at the beginning of a class.

“Yes, children, please put your notebooks away,” a teacher might say. “We have a surprise quiz today.”

“Oh, seriously? That’s awesome. Oh, man. I can’t wait to tell my friends on Snapchat that we got a surprise quiz. This is the best. I mean, we sometimes have regular quizzes that we know about in advance, but a surprise quiz is a huge bonus. I imagined surprise quizzes when I was younger, but this is the real thing. You are the absolute best teacher I’ve ever had and I’m sure I’ll remember this quiz for a long time.”

Now, I know those of you with adolescent children can hear sarcasm in that conversation. I prefer to imagine unbridled enthusiasm.

The scrambler button may be used in different circumstances.

Perhaps our boss described our work as “moronic.” Let’s dial in the goofy uncle trying to get a nephew to giggle.

“Oh, yeah, who’s a great boss?” you might say as your voice rises. “Come on. Who? Oh, wait, where’d you go?” you ask, as you cover your eyes. “Where’s that great boss of mine? Did you disappear? Where’s the boss? Where is the most spectacular boss anyone has ever seen? There he is … peekaboo!

If you’ve ever been to a volleyball tournament, you know that even the most stoic and reserved girl screeches through the match. The team comes together after each point in the center of the floor, putting their arms around each other and congratulating themselves.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your train is delayed due to switching problems,” an announcer might say over a loudspeaker to a group of commuters.

“Yeah, cool,” the commuters might scream as they come together in a circle of delight on the platform, tossing their briefcases to the side and jumping straight up in the air and pumping their fists.

Or, perhaps, you’re an enthusiastic coach and you’ve asked your child to pass the salt.

“Good job, kid, good job,” you might say in a voice that’s way too loud for an indoor meal.“Now, keep the salt in your right hand. Stay balanced. Focus only on the salt. Don’t shake it, don’t think about not shaking it or you’ll start to shake it. Now, ease it over here. Way to go, kid, you’re doing great. You’re almost there — that’s some great clutch salt passing. Now, after the meal, don’t forget to shake hands with the pepper and tell it that you had a good meal.”

Modern mythology, as it was for those Greeks and Romans long ago, is a carnival mirror. Mythology helps us see ourselves and our world using distortions to exaggerate truths or to give us a chance to focus on different parts of our lives and society.

The Greeks created these spectacular stories to understand how the sun crossed the sky to where spiders came from. The former occurred because Apollo pulled a chariot across the sky and the latter was a result of a mortal woman named Arachne engaging in a weaving contest with the goddess Athena.

For the Greeks, these stories offered a possible cause for the inexplicable and helped ordinary people cope with the seemingly arbitrary and capricious nature of events around them. Why, they might wonder, did their favorite tree die when lightning struck it? Zeus must have been upset about the latest offering or about the words you said when you were at the market. A chest of gold washed ashore near you? You must have done something to please Poseidon.

Our modern myths and heroes come from many places. People win Purple Heart decorations from grateful presidents, earn medals of honor for their valor, or walk or run hundreds of miles to raise money for worthy causes. The list, of course, is much longer than that: Scientists and doctors fight to find cures for cancer, autism, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and many other problems; firefighters race into burning buildings to save others; and police officers protect and serve our communities.

Hollywood wants a piece of the hero action, pumping out movies about people with the everyday courage to challenge conventional thinking. The studios have invested considerable money in the live action version of comic book characters, cranking out stories about men and women with spectacular powers, incredible toys and spirited enemies.

In a new twist, Batman and Superman will battle it out around the same time that Captain America and Iron Man clash. Is it a coincidence that these movies are coming out at around the same time? Maybe. Is it a coincidence that they’re coming out at the same time that Trump and Hillary get ready for the main event? Maybe not.

In any case, these movies, which hope to capture plenty of dollars, have seized on something visible in our carnival mirror. People, like their on-screen superheroes, want to do the right thing — whatever that may be. At the same time, others, driven by a similar desire, may pull in the opposite direction. A conflict is inevitable, particularly in the context of a modern world in which quick reflexes are more important than reason and consideration.

We don’t sleep on decisions anymore or consider our moves or the consequences. With people plugged in wherever they are, the world requires instant responses. Strength comes from thoughts that travel at the speed of Zeus’ lightning bolt.

Like the Greek gods who fought with each other, our modern movie heroes are no better than the rest of us. They are limited by their perspectives, weaknesses and a past that threatens to push them in the same decision-making rut.

What does the carnival mirror, at least the one that Hollywood is using, suggest about where we’re heading in a country divided between red and blue states, between us and them? I don’t know how these new movies end, but I suspect these superheroes learned to stop fighting and work together.

Hopefully, the Republicans and Democrats, who stand in front of the same flag and ask God to bless America, will figure out a way to reach across the aisle and create the kind of peace, security and prosperity we would all like to experience. Wouldn’t that be a nice Hollywood ending?